Celebrate the holidays at Tía Chucha’s Winterlandia!

Don’t miss this wonderful holiday event! For more information and to RSVP (if you wish...not required), visit Tía Chucha’s Facebook announcement. Please share this news with your friends and family.

The mission of Tía Chucha’s Centro Cultural is to transform community in the Northeast San Fernando Valley and beyond through ancestral knowledge, the arts, literacy and creative engagement.

Tía Chucha’s began as a café, bookstore and cultural space owned and run by Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriguez, his wife Trini, and their brother-in-law Enrique Sanchez. In 2003 Luis, along with singer/musicologist Angelica Loa Perez and Xicano rap artist Victor Mendoza established a next-door sister nonprofit to incorporate a full range of arts workshops. When in 2007 the cultural café and bookstore disbanded as an LLC, it donated its assets, including inventory, shelves, equipment, and more to the nonprofit to carry its mission forward. Tía Chucha’s cultural center now provides year-round on-site and off-site free or low-cost arts and literacy bilingual intergenerational programming in mural painting, music, dance, writing, visual arts, healing arts sessions (such as reiki healing) and healing/talking circles. Workshops and activities also include Mexica ("Aztec") dance, indigenous cosmology/philosophy, and open mic nights. Tía Chucha’s hosts author readings, film screenings, and art exhibits as well. It's a wonderful, important, vibrant space that offers so much to the community. Check it out!

IN OTHER NEWS…

◙ I am honored to offer formal praise and support (i.e., back-cover blurb) for Roberto Cantú's new book, The Forked Juniper: Critical Perspectives on Rudolfo Anaya (University of Oklahoma Press): “All post-Ultima Chicano literature is rooted in Rudolfo Anaya’s aesthetic. It is shocking—almost criminal—therefore, that there are not a plethora of scholarly Anaya books already in print. Roberto Cantú’s The Forked Juniper is an exhilarating and eclectic collection of essays that offers a much-needed contemporary overview and multifaceted analysis of Anaya’s writings. This enthralling work will, no doubt, become a natural companion to the study of one of our greatest living authors.”

◙ I am so excited that my next book, The King of Lighting Fixtures: Stories, will be published in fall 2017 by the very wonderful University of Arizona Press. It includes almost three dozen stories including this one just published by the literary journal Fourth & Sycamore.

◙ Follow me on Twitter at @olivasdan. I will happily Tweet your literary news.